Sebastian found himself considering Jane Ambrose’s ties to the House of Hanover as he studied the pink-tinged snow around the dead woman’s head. Alexi Sauvage was right: If Jane Ambrose had been killed here in Shepherds’ Lane, the snow would have been drenched crimson with her blood. It was not.
“I wonder why she was left here, of all places,” he said aloud.
Lovejoy hunched his shoulders against an icy gust. “Unfortunately, the wind and snow have covered any tracks her killer might have left. I suppose it’s possible she was attacked somewhere near here by footpads who were then interrupted in the process of dragging the body to a less public locale.”
Sebastian touched the bloodstained fur-trimmed collar of Jane Ambrose’s pelisse where a gold locket still hung around the dead woman’s neck. “No footpad would leave that.”
Lovejoy cast a quick glance around, then crouched on the far side of the body and pitched his voice low enough to be inaudible to the constables holding back the crowds that were beginning to gather despite the freezing temperature and wind-driven snow. “And yet I fear the palace is likely to insist on saying some such thing is what happened. If we’re to get a postmortem, we’d best move quickly.”
Sebastian met the magistrate’s gaze and nodded.
Pushing to his feet, Lovejoy sent one of his men running to the nearest deadhouse for a shell that could be used to transport the body to the surgery of Paul Gibson, an anatomist known for his ability to read the evidence left by violent death. It was when they were lifting what was left of Jane Ambrose onto the shell that Sebastian noticed the dead woman’s hands, which until then had lain hidden beneath the folds of her pelisse.
They were bare.
“She’s not wearing gloves,” said Sebastian. “Or a hat, for that matter.”
Lovejoy came to stand beside him. “How very odd.” Even in the best of weather, no gentlewoman would think of appearing in public without a hat and gloves. And in this weather, it would be madness. “I’ll set the lads to beating the snowdrifts to look for them. Perhaps they’re lying somewhere hereabouts.”
“Perhaps,” said Sebastian. “But it would still be odd.”
Chapter 3
While a solemn-faced Lovejoy set off to personally notify Edward Ambrose of his wife’s death, Sebastian spent the better part of the next hour scouting the surrounding area and knocking on the doors of the ancient dilapidated houses that lined the crooked lane. He was hoping to find someone who’d seen or at least heard something. But the bitter cold and heavy snowfall had long ago driven the area’s residents to their firesides; no one would admit to knowing anything.
Giving up, he stood for a moment and watched Lovejoy’s constables, their lanterns shuttered against the driving snow as they continued to flounder about in the deep drifts looking for Jane Ambrose’s missing hat and gloves or anything else that might help explain what had happened to her. The snow muffled their movements the same way it silenced the usual racket of the vast, freezing city around them. And it struck Sebastian that, so intense was the unnatural hush, they might have been in a snowy forest glen surrounded only by the unseen creatures of the night.
Readjusting his hat against the snow, he shook off the peculiar thought and turned his steps toward the Tower Hill surgery of a certain one-legged, opium-eating Irishman.
Sebastian’s friendship with the Irish surgeon Paul Gibson stretched back nearly ten years, to a time when both men wore the King’s colors and fought the King’s wars from Italy and the West Indies to the mountains of Portugal. Then a French cannonball shattered Gibson’s lower left leg, leaving him racked with phantom pains and struggling with a dangerous opium addiction. That was when he had come here, to London, to teach anatomy at hospitals such as St. Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s and to open a small surgery in the shadow of the Tower.
But when Sebastian arrived at the lantern-lit stone outbuilding used by Gibson for both official autopsies and surreptitious, illegal dissections, it was to find only the Frenchwoman Alexi Sauvage with a stained apron pinned over her gown and a bloody scalpel in one hand.
A fine-boned woman in her thirties with pale skin, brown eyes, and hair the color of autumn leaves, she looked up from the naked body that lay on the stone slab in the center of the room and said, “Ah, it’s you,” before going back to work on what was left of Jane Ambrose.
Pausing in the doorway, Sebastian cast one quick glance at what she was doing and turned to stare across the undulating snow-filled yard toward the ancient stone house Paul Gibson used as his surgery. Alexi Sauvage had lived with the Irishman for a year now, although she steadfastly refused to marry him. “Where’s Gibson?”
This time she did not look up. “A wherry overturned trying to shoot the bridge. Some timber yard workers managed to rescue two of the three men aboard, but they were half-dead by the time they were pulled from the river, and Paul has gone to see what
